No livestock

[viscounteric]

Gotta be careful there, though. There's a difference between a combination that makes a good single crop, and a long-term sustainable configuration.

As an example - with those three plants all growing in one place, the soil is having nutrients removed at a high rate. Especialy since much of the energy is going into production of fruit that gets carried away from the garden. All those plants are annuals, so next year's plants won't gain from this year's growth. They'll have to start all over from scratch, eating up more nutrients. Do that for too many crop cycles, and you'll need lots of fertilizer to sustain them.

If I remember from grade school, the native americans did use some form of fertilizer. (Fish if I remember the pictures in the textbooks, but I've never read of it since).


The societal impacts have been discussed, but how does magic develop in a weaker agrarian economy? All these summoning and necromantic spells are great, but how many mages are going to be around, much less how many will actually be powerful enough to cast the necessary spells?

 

[alsih2o]

Gotta be careful there, though. There's a difference between a combination that makes a good single crop, and a long-term sustainable configuration.

As an example - with those three plants all growing in one place, the soil is having nutrients removed at a high rate. Especialy since much of the energy is going into production of fruit that gets carried away from the garden. All those plants are annuals, so next year's plants won't gain from this year's growth. They'll have to start all over from scratch, eating up more nutrients. Do that for too many crop cycles, and you'll need lots of fertilizer to sustain them.

Not as much as you might think. The beans are nitrogen fixers, and balance the other two quite nicely. I am not sayign it is indefinetely sustainable, but it has advantages.

 

[Aries_Omega]

It would be interesting to do a campaign in which there was no livestock. My ol' DM did one that we all played character in an ice age style game. Hunting became a major skill to have as well as being able to shape flint and other stones into points.

Aries

 

[Dogbrain]

It would be interesting to do a campaign in which there was no livestock. My ol' DM did one that we all played character in an ice age style game. Hunting became a major skill to have as well as being able to shape flint and other stones into points.

In such a setting, a major enchantment would simply be "preserve edge", since stone "blades", while quite sharp, also will go uselessly blunt very easily.

 

[Aries_Omega]

Enchantments

Exactly right with "preserve edge" also metal....only the enigmatic and rarely encountered dwarves had any....ANY idea of how to work it. He (the DM) had an alternative to the standard special materials such as stonest that acted a steel weapons. They had to be carved and soaked in a special liquid made from the fat of this creature, blood of this and a pinch of that for flavor before it was ready....for 30 days only. It was a great campaign. He added that under the polar ice was a crumbled civlizations. We theorized that a standard AD&D style world once thrived but now only this savage ice age one was left.

Anyhow we had similar problems of no domesticated animals except dogs. Druids played a big part in the game as well as rangers. Halflings were these feral creatures, elves were feared since they had bows a plenty and gnomes were not often found but friendly. Dwarves....were stuff of legend.

Aries

 

[Pielorinho]

ONe problem with pestkilling spells (or Circle of Death) is that you'd kill off the beneficial bugs and worms as well, most likely.

Killing off earthworms creates obvious problems: earthworms aerate the soil, improving the soil's ability to hold both water and air, and making it much easier for roots to penetrate the soil. Without them, your farm is going to be far less productive, as plant roots get inadequate air and water and nutrients.

Killing off bugs is a little more complicated. Below is a simplified explanation of the problems it creates.

Because of the way that energy cycles through an ecosystem, herbivorous critters tend to have a pretty quick life cycle: it's to their advantage to lay lots of eggs and mature very quickly, so that at least some of their genes can get passed on to the next generation (i.e., so some of the kids don't get eaten). Carnivorous critters tend to have a slower life cycle, and fewer of them exist in a system: the amount of energy available to a carnivore is roughly 10% of the amount of energy available to herbivores (due to entropy--about 90% of energy consumed by a creature radiates as heat).

What this means is that if you kill everything in an area, it's gonna be the herbivores--the pest insects--that move back into the area first, and the carnivores--the beneficial bugs that eat the pests--take a lot longer to reestablish themselves.

This is why many modern farmers who use pesticides try to target their pesticide use to interfere with a specific insects' reproductive cycle, rather than using broad-spectrum kill-everything agents.

In D&D terms, druids would caution that killing everything in an area will anger the Nature Gods, and that the gods will retaliate with a plague of locusts on the area.

Daniel

 

[alsih2o]

ONe problem with pestkilling spells......that the gods will retaliate with a plague of locusts on the area.

Daniel

Yeah, but you should see them do the aerial spraying.

Arms out, sweeping low, that funky spell-smke coming form their robes.

It is beautiful...

 

[Pielorinho]

Cloudkill, baby!

Daniel

 

[Rel]

So the question on my mind is how many of these magical agricultural techniques are incorporated into Eberron?

 

[diaglo]

Cloudkill, baby!

Daniel

the intake of CO2 would kill the plants too.